Linux Blog

testlinear

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Program to test linear addressing on Cirrus cards and on Mach32 (and other cards which
may support it).

Selects 640x480x256 and tries to enable a linear frame buffer
(its virtual address is printed). Fills the screen in some color,
then draws pixels in random positions.

For Cirrus cards some
direct hardware access is then made for highspeed screen access.
Except for the last (Cirrus only) test no speeds are printed, but
you are welcome to use 'time' to measure it. The program draws
714400 one byte pixels plus a forced 1s delay and various rand()
calls for the pixels.

The
testlinear
demo needs a few presses of
<Return>
after each
minimal demo step. Even when it does not prompt for it. When it
appears to be stuck, just press
<Return>.

The
lineart
demo is the same, but it accepts a command line with an arbitrary
number of modes. The modes may be either mode numbers or names, or
both. For example,

lineart 11 17 G800x600x32k 22

will give a display of mode 11. If a key is pressed mode 17 will
appear, followed by mode 20 and 22 as succesive keys are pressed.

This demo is part of svgalib and can be found in the
demos/
subdirectory of the original svgalib distribution. However, it is not installed in the system
by default, s.t. it is unclear where you can find it if your svgalib was installed by some
linux distribution. Even then, when you have the demo on your system, you probably won't have
the sources s.t. it is only of limited use for you.

In case of any such problem, simply get an svgalib distribution from the net. You even
don't need to install it. Just
make
in the
demos/
subdirecty. As of this writing,
svgalib-1.2.12.tar.gz
is the latest version and can be retrieved by ftp from
sunsite.unc.edu at /pub/Linux/libs/graphics
and
tsx-11.mit.edu at /pub/linux/sources/libs
which will most probably be mirrored by a site close to you.